Gita Govinda

Overview

Poet

Jayadeva, a Sanskrit poet of eastern India; he names himself in nearly every song, calls his birthplace Kindubilva and his wife Padmavati, and is traditionally placed at the court of King Lakshmana Sena of Bengal

Date

Late twelfth century; Lakshmana Sena reigned from about 1178 to about 1206, and verses attributed to Jayadeva appear in Shridharadasa's Bengal anthology of about 1205

Language and form

Sanskrit; a cycle of twenty-four songs (prabandhas, usually of eight couplets and so also called ashtapadis), each marked with a raga and a tala, set within narrative and descriptive verses in classical metres

Structure

Twelve sargas ('cantos'), each named after an epithet of Krishna that sums up his state of mind in it

Subject

The love of Krishna and Radha: his dalliance with the cowherd women in spring, her jealous withdrawal, their separation, the messages carried by Radha's friend, reconciliation and union

Setting

The forests of Vrindavana on the banks of the Yamuna (Arnold's 'Jumna'), in spring and through one long night to dawn

Speakers

Radha, Krishna and Radha's friend, with the poet's own voice in the closing couplet of each song; short narrative verses link the songs

This translation

Sir Edwin Arnold, The Indian Song of Songs (London, 1875), a free verse paraphrase rather than a close translation

What Arnold leaves out

The opening verses of the first sarga, parts of the tenth and eleventh, and the whole of the twelfth, in which the lovers' union is described and Radha asks Krishna to adorn her again

Afterlife

Sung daily in the temple of Jagannatha at Puri, cherished by Chaitanya and the Bengal Vaishnavas, danced in Odissi, painted in Rajput and Pahari courts, and the first Sanskrit lyric widely read in Europe after William Jones's version of 1792

Context

The Gita Govinda ('Govinda in Song') was composed in the late twelfth century in eastern India. Its author, Jayadeva, tells us a little about himself in the signature verses that close his songs: he names his birthplace as Kindubilva and his wife as Padmavati, and one verse of the first sarga places him among four other poets, Umapatidhara, Sharana, Govardhana and Dhoyi, who are associated with the court of Lakshmana Sena, the last great Sena king of Bengal. On that evidence most scholars set the poem in Bengal in the years around 1180 to 1200, shortly before the Turkish conquest of the region. A rival tradition claims Jayadeva for Orissa, where a village called Kenduli also exists and where the poem was sung in the temple of Jagannatha at Puri from at least the fifteenth century; the question has never been settled (Miller 1977) (De 1961).

Jayadeva wrote for a court culture steeped in kavya, the refined Sanskrit poetry of love, landscape and praise collected in anthologies such as Vidyakara's Treasury, and his verses use its stock of images: the cool south wind from the Malaya hills, the koil's cry in the mango groves, the bee and the lotus, the god of love Kama with his five flower-arrows (Ingalls 1965). What is new is the form. Between the narrative verses in classical metres he set twenty-four songs, each labelled with a melodic mode (raga) and a rhythmic cycle (tala), each with a refrain, and each closing with a couplet in which Jayadeva names himself and offers the song to its hearers. The poem is therefore a work to be performed as well as read, close to the regional song traditions that grew alongside it (Miller 1977) (Siegel 2009).

Its subject is the love of Krishna and Radha. Krishna, worshipped as an incarnation or as the fullest form of the god Vishnu, was by Jayadeva's time the hero of a large body of stories about his youth among the cowherds of Vrindavana, told most fully in the tenth book of the Bhagavata Purana, where the cowherd women, the gopis, leave their homes to dance with him by night. Radha is not named in the Bhagavata; she appears earlier in scattered verses of Prakrit and Sanskrit poetry, but it is the Gita Govinda that makes her the single beloved at the centre of Krishna's story, the equal and sometimes the mistress of the god (Hawley 1982) (Archer 1957).

The poem's importance for Indian religion is hard to overstate. It became a foundational text for the devotional movements known as bhakti, in which God is approached through loving emotion rather than ritual or knowledge, and especially for the Vaishnavas of Bengal who followed Chaitanya (1486–1533), for whom the love of Radha and Krishna was the highest model of the soul's relation to God (De 1961) (Dimock 1966) (Hardy 1983). It was set to music and dance across India, copied and illustrated in hundreds of manuscripts, and imitated by later poets in Sanskrit and the vernaculars (Randhawa 1963).

For English readers the poem has had a second history. Sir William Jones, the founder of the Asiatic Society in Calcutta, published a prose version in Asiatick Researches in 1792, with an essay that read it as a mystical allegory comparable to Persian Sufi poetry and to the Song of Songs; the German Romantics read it through him, and Christian Lassen edited the Sanskrit text with a Latin translation in 1836 (Jones 1792) (Lassen 1836) (Schwab 1984). Edwin Arnold (1832–1904), who had taught at the Deccan College in Poona before becoming a journalist in London, made one of the first English verse renderings in 1875 and called it The Indian Song of Songs. His version, the one quoted in this guide, is a Victorian poem in its own right: musical, inventive, and much freer, and much more moralising, than its title page suggests (Arnold 1875) (Wright 1957).

Plot overview

After a hymn in praise of Vishnu's ten incarnations, the poem opens in spring in the forest of Vrindavana. Radha, searching for Krishna, is shown by her friend how he dances and makes love with the cowherd women. Wounded, Radha withdraws to a bower, remembers his love for her, and sends her friend to him. Krishna, meanwhile, grows tired of the dancers, thinks of Radha, and searches for her in vain; he sits by the Yamuna in remorse.

Radha's friend becomes the go-between. She tells Krishna how Radha is wasting with love and tells Radha how Krishna waits for her by the river, urging each to go to the other. Radha is too weak to go; Krishna is urged to come. As the moon rises and he does not appear, Radha imagines him in another woman's arms and pours out her jealousy and despair through the night.

At dawn Krishna arrives, bearing the marks of another night's love, and Radha angrily sends him away. Her friend persuades her to give up her proud anger. Krishna returns and pleads for forgiveness in a song of praise and self-abasement; Radha relents. In the evening her companions lead her, dressed as a bride, to the bower where Krishna waits, and she enters.

In Jayadeva's Sanskrit a twelfth sarga follows, describing the lovers' night together and Radha's request that Krishna rearrange her hair, ornaments and make-up, after which the poet closes with verses on his art. Arnold omits that sarga and ends his version as Radha crosses the threshold of the bower, with a blessing in the name of Hari and a last stanza of praise for the poem.

Part by part

Characters

The lovers

Krishna (Hari, Keshava, Govinda, Madhava)

The cowherd god of Vrindavana, worshipped as Vishnu or as the supreme God. The poem calls him by many names, and each sarga's title pairs one of them with his state of mind: joyful, carefree, bewildered, tender, longing, bold, and so on. He is in turn the playful lover of many women, the remorseful lover of one, and the humble suppliant at Radha's feet; the poem never lets its audience forget that this lover is also the lord of the ten avatars.

Radha

A cowherd woman and Krishna's chosen beloved. Barely mentioned in earlier literature, she is the centre of the Gita Govinda, which gives her its richest songs: jealousy, longing, despair, anger, forgiveness and command. For later Bengal Vaishnavas she became the divine consort and the perfect devotee. Arnold calls her an 'angel' and makes her a figure of heavenly love waiting for the erring soul.

Go-between

Radha's friend (the sakhi)

Radha's confidante, who carries messages between the lovers, describes each to the other and urges them to meet. She speaks many of the songs and is the main agent of the plot. In later devotion the role of the friend, who serves the lovers' union without seeking Krishna for herself, became a model for the worshipper.

The cowherd women

The gopis

The cowherd women of Vrindavana who dance and play with Krishna in the spring forest of the first sarga, and one of whom Radha imagines as her rival in the seventh. In the Sanskrit they are vivid and real; Arnold makes them 'Shadows', 'phantoms' and 'Visions of the earth', the distractions of sense.

The poet

Jayadeva

The poet speaks in his own name at the end of almost every song, offering it to its hearers and praying that it may delight and purify them. These signatures make the poem a devotional performance as well as a story. Arnold renders them as rhymed trochaic interludes in which 'Jayadev' explains the hidden meaning.

Divinities

Kama (Madana, the 'Bodiless Lord')

The god of love, armed with a sugar-cane bow and five flower-arrows. Burned to ashes by Shiva, he lives on bodiless. Krishna protests to him in the third sarga, and Radha begs him to kill her in the seventh.

Vishnu and Lakshmi

Vishnu, praised in the opening hymn through his ten avatars, is the god of whom Krishna is a form; his consort Lakshmi (Arnold's 'Kumla', from Kamala) appears in the second hymn as the goddess whose embrace marks his chest. Radha's love is implicitly mapped onto Lakshmi's.

Place

The Yamuna (Jumna)

The river of Vrindavana, by whose banks Krishna sits waiting and in whose waters Radha in despair wishes to drown. In myth the river is a goddess, sister of Yama, the god of death.

Themes

Sacred and erotic love

The poem refuses to separate religious and sexual feeling. Its hymns praise the god through the marks of his consort's embrace; its love songs end in prayers. Jayadeva's own verse near the beginning of the first sarga addresses those whose hearts delight in remembering Hari and who are curious about the arts of love, as if these were one audience (Siegel 1978).

Readers have divided on how to take this. Some see the eroticism as a code for spiritual truths; others see the poem as a celebration of human love sanctified by the divine. Most modern scholars stress that Jayadeva's tradition did not need to choose, since in it the experience of love (shringara) could itself be a way of knowing God (Miller 1977) (Siegel 1978).

Separation and longing (viraha)

Almost the whole poem is spent apart. The lovers meet only at the end; before that they see each other once in anger. Separation intensifies love, and the songs of longing, with their fevers, sleeplessness and hallucinations, are the poem's emotional substance.

In bhakti religion the pain of separation from God became a central devotional emotion, and the Gita Govinda gave it its classic images. Friedhelm Hardy traced this 'viraha-bhakti' back to early Tamil devotional poetry; Jayadeva's poem carried it into Sanskrit and across northern India (Hardy 1983).

Jealousy, pride and forgiveness

Radha is not a passive beloved. She watches, judges, sulks, rebukes and finally forgives. Her mana, the proud anger of the wronged woman, has to be overcome by her friend's persuasion and Krishna's pleading before union is possible.

The poem treats the quarrel as part of love, not its enemy. Jayadeva's sympathy is with Radha's anger as much as with Krishna's penitence, and the god must humble himself before her (Hawley 1982).

Divine play (lila)

Krishna's dalliance in the spring forest is lila, play: action freely done for delight, not need. The idea that God's relation to the world, and to the soul, is a kind of play gave theologians a way to see the love story as both trivial and infinitely serious (Kinsley 1979).

The poem's lightness of tone, its jokes against Kama and its comic bed-making scene belong to this playfulness. Arnold, more earnest, tends to turn play into error and repentance.

Nature as the language of love

Every natural detail in the poem expresses desire: the south wind, the mango blossoms, the bees, the koil's call, the moon. Spring and moonlight are the lovers' companions, and in separation they turn into torments.

This language draws on the long tradition of Sanskrit court poetry, in which landscapes have fixed emotional meanings; Jayadeva's achievement is to set it to music and fuse it with a devotional story (Ingalls 1965) (Miller 1977).

Motifs

The signature couplets

Each Sanskrit song ends with a couplet naming Jayadeva and offering the song to its hearers, the device later called bhanita. These signatures frame the love story as a sacred offering. Arnold expands them into trochaic interludes that explain the poem's hidden meaning (Miller 1977).

The refrain

Every song is built around a refrain, sung after each couplet. Arnold sometimes keeps it in Sanskrit ('Yami hê kam sharanam!', 'Mâ kooroo mânini mânamayè'), sometimes renders it as a repeated English phrase ('Krishna, till thou come unto her'), and sometimes drops it.

Messages and go-betweens

The plot is carried by the friend's journeys between Radha and Krishna, and by descriptions of each lover to the other. Much of what the audience sees is reported, imagined or persuasive speech.

Ornament and make-up

Necklaces, girdles, anklet bells, sandal paste, saffron, tilaka and eye-black recur as signs of love: too heavy to wear in separation, telltale on Krishna's body after infidelity, bells to be muffled or loosened on the way to the tryst.

Kama's arrows

The god of love's five flower-arrows appear in the spring landscape, in Krishna's complaint in the third sarga and in his praise of Radha's features in the tenth: love as a wound inflicted by beauty.

Symbols

The spring forest of Vrindavana

The place of Krishna's play and of desire itself; for devotional readers an earthly image of the divine realm.

The bower (kunja)

The secret thicket where the lovers meet, prepared with flowers and waited in; its threshold is where Arnold's version ends.

The moon

The lamp of lovers and the torment of the separated, rising over Vrindavana in the seventh sarga; Krishna compares himself to the chakora bird that lives on moonlight.

The bee and the lotus

The roving lover and the waiting beloved; in the sixth sarga the friend insists that the bee must find the flower.

The Yamuna

The river by which Krishna waits and in which Radha wishes to drown: the boundary of love and death, and a sacred river in its own right.

Critical debates

Sacred allegory or erotic poem?

From William Jones onwards, Western readers asked whether the Gita Govinda is a mystical allegory, in which Krishna is the human soul and Radha divine love or wisdom, or a sensual love poem with a religious veneer. Jones, comparing it with Sufi poetry and the Song of Songs, read it allegorically, and Arnold followed him (Jones 1792) (Arnold 1875).

Lee Siegel's study argued that the poem holds sacred and profane love together without reducing either to the other, and that Indian commentators read it in both registers at once. Barbara Stoler Miller likewise stressed that the erotic mood (shringara rasa) was itself a way to religious experience in Jayadeva's culture, so that the question 'sacred or profane?' is posed in Western rather than Indian terms (Siegel 1978) (Miller 1977).

Where was Jayadeva from?

Jayadeva calls himself a native of Kindubilva. A village called Kenduli in Birbhum, West Bengal, holds a yearly fair in his honour, and the verse naming poets of Lakshmana Sena's court supports a Bengali setting. Orissan tradition identifies another Kenduli near Puri, points to the poem's early and continuous use in the Jagannatha temple and to inscriptions, and claims Jayadeva as an Oriya poet.

Sushil Kumar De and Miller set out the Bengali case; the Orissan case has strong regional support, and the dispute remains open, partly because much of the evidence is late tradition (De 1961) (Miller 1977).

Radha before and after Jayadeva

Radha is absent from the Bhagavata Purana, the principal text of Krishna's youth, and appears only occasionally in earlier poetry. Did Jayadeva draw on a living cult of Radha, perhaps in eastern India, or did his poem largely create her religious importance? The essays edited by John Stratton Hawley and Donna Marie Wulff survey the evidence and the later theological elevation of Radha as Krishna's divine consort and energy (Hawley 1982).

W. G. Archer's survey of the Krishna stories in poetry and painting shows how quickly, after Jayadeva, Radha became the central heroine of the cowherd story across India (Archer 1957).

Song, drama or kavya?

Lassen subtitled his edition 'drama lyricum', a lyrical drama, and others have compared the poem to pastoral drama or to the cantata. The poem has speaking characters and a plot but no stage directions; it has the polished verses of court kavya but its songs carry raga and tala markings for performance (Lassen 1836).

Miller and Siegel treat it as a unique fusion of classical Sanskrit poetry with regional song forms, designed for performance in temple or court, and later Indian tradition has staged it in dance and music as well as reading it (Miller 1977) (Siegel 2009).

Bhakti, theology and the Sahajiyas

The poem was adopted by Chaitanya and by the Gaudiya Vaishnava theologians of Bengal, who built on it an elaborate doctrine of devotional emotion in which the love of Radha for Krishna is the supreme religious state. Its place in that tradition shaped how it was read for centuries (De 1961).

The Vaishnava Sahajiya movement went further, treating the love of Radha and Krishna as a model for ritual practice between human partners. Edward C. Dimock's study shows how the erotic mysticism latent in the Gita Govinda was taken up in radically different ways, and Friedhelm Hardy's work on viraha-bhakti places the poem in a longer history of devotional longing reaching back to South India (Dimock 1966) (Hardy 1983).

The Song of Songs comparison

Jones first compared the Gita Govinda to the Song of Songs, and Arnold's title made the comparison its frame. Both are sequences of love lyrics in dialogue, rich in garden and landscape imagery, which religious traditions have read as allegories of divine love: in Jewish and Christian exegesis, of God and Israel or Christ and the Church or soul (Jones 1792) (Pope 1977).

The comparison illuminates and distorts. Like the Song of Songs, the Gita Govinda resists purely allegorical reading; but unlike the biblical poem it names its divine lover openly, is framed by hymns and devotional signatures, and was composed as a sacred poem from the start. Marvin Pope's commentary on the Song of Songs shows how variously its own erotic and allegorical readings have been argued, which suggests that the comparison works better as a question than as an equation (Pope 1977) (Siegel 1978).

Arnold, Orientalism and translation

Arnold's version belongs to the Victorian discovery of Indian literature, which Raymond Schwab described as an 'Oriental Renaissance' and which later critics, after Edward Said, have examined for its colonial assumptions. Arnold's preface and notes present the poem as a spiritual allegory and adapt it to Victorian taste (Schwab 1984) (Said 1978) (Trautmann 1997).

Brooks Wright's biography shows Arnold as a popular interpreter of Asian religions whose Light of Asia (1879) made the Buddha a figure of Victorian moral idealism. The same tendencies shape The Indian Song of Songs: the gopis become phantoms, the lovers' reunion becomes a wedding, and the twelfth sarga is left out. Comparison with Miller's or Siegel's close translations makes Arnold's choices visible (Wright 1957) (Miller 1977) (Siegel 2009).

Key passages

Questions for study

1. Why does a love poem begin with a hymn to Vishnu's ten avatars?

   Think about who Krishna is, the closing prayer of the second hymn, and Jayadeva's signature verses throughout.

2. How does the spring landscape of the first sarga shape the reader's understanding of Krishna's dalliance?

   Look at the refrain about not living alone and the erotic character of every natural detail.

3. What is the role of Radha's friend in the poem's structure?

   Count the songs she sings, consider what she tells each lover about the other, and think of the go-between in love poetry.

4. Compare Krishna's remorse in the third sarga with Radha's despair in the seventh. How does the poem balance the two lovers?

   Consider the language of sin and refuge, and who is the suppliant at different points.

5. How does the poem use the conventions of Sanskrit love poetry, such as the types of heroine, the abhisara and mana?

   Look at the fifth, seventh, eighth and ninth sargas.

6. Is the Gita Govinda an allegory? Argue for and against.

   Weigh Arnold's interludes and Jones's reading against Jayadeva's own signature verses and the frankness of the seventh and eighth sargas.

7. What does the poem suggest about the relationship between God and the human soul in bhakti?

   Think about Krishna's humility before Radha in the tenth sarga and the idea of viraha.

8. How useful is Arnold's title, The Indian Song of Songs?

   Compare the dialogue, imagery and allegorical history of the biblical Song with Jayadeva's poem, and note what the comparison hides.

9. What does Arnold's version gain and lose by its free handling of the Sanskrit?

   Look at his trochaic interludes, his treatment of the gopis as 'phantoms', and his omission of the twelfth sarga.

10. Why might Arnold have ended at the threshold of the bower?

    Consider Victorian decorum, the marriage imagery of his eleventh sarga, and the allegory of the soul reaching heaven.

Further reading

• Archer, W. G. The Loves of Krishna in Indian Painting and Poetry. London: George Allen & Unwin, 1957.
• Arnold, Edwin, trans. The Indian Song of Songs: From the Sanskrit of the Gîta Govinda of Jayadeva. London: Trübner, 1875.
• De, Sushil Kumar. Early History of the Vaisnava Faith and Movement in Bengal from Sanskrit and Bengali Sources. 2nd ed. Calcutta: Firma K. L. Mukhopadhyay, 1961.
• Dimock, Edward C., Jr. The Place of the Hidden Moon: Erotic Mysticism in the Vaiṣṇava-sahajiyā Cult of Bengal. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1966.
• Hardy, Friedhelm. Viraha-Bhakti: The Early History of Kṛṣṇa Devotion in South India. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1983.
• Hawley, John Stratton, and Donna Marie Wulff, eds. The Divine Consort: Rādhā and the Goddesses of India. Berkeley: Berkeley Religious Studies Series, 1982.
• Ingalls, Daniel H. H., trans. An Anthology of Sanskrit Court Poetry: Vidyākara's Subhāṣitaratnakoṣa. Harvard Oriental Series 44. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965.
• Jones, William. 'On the Mystical Poetry of the Persians and Hindus.' Asiatick Researches 3 (1792).
• Kinsley, David R. The Divine Player: A Study of Kṛṣṇa Līlā. Delhi: Motilal Banarsidass, 1979.
• Lassen, Christian, ed. and trans. Gita Govinda: Jayadevae poetae Indici drama lyricum. Bonn: König, 1836.
• Miller, Barbara Stoler, ed. and trans. Love Song of the Dark Lord: Jayadeva's Gītagovinda. New York: Columbia University Press, 1977.
• Pope, Marvin H. Song of Songs: A New Translation with Introduction and Commentary. Anchor Bible 7C. Garden City, NY: Doubleday, 1977.
• Randhawa, M. S. Kangra Paintings of the Gīta Govinda. New Delhi: National Museum, 1963.
• Said, Edward W. Orientalism. New York: Pantheon Books, 1978.
• Schwab, Raymond. The Oriental Renaissance: Europe's Rediscovery of India and the East, 1680–1880. Translated by Gene Patterson-Black and Victor Reinking. New York: Columbia University Press, 1984.
• Siegel, Lee. Sacred and Profane Dimensions of Love in Indian Traditions as Exemplified in the Gītagovinda of Jayadeva. Delhi: Oxford University Press, 1978.
• Siegel, Lee, trans. Gītagovinda: Love Songs of Rādhā and Kṛṣṇa, by Jayadeva. Clay Sanskrit Library. New York: New York University Press and JJC Foundation, 2009.
• Trautmann, Thomas R. Aryans and British India. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997.
• Wright, Brooks. Interpreter of Buddhism to the West: Sir Edwin Arnold. New York: Bookman Associates, 1957.